Love of football just might not be enough to keep it viable

Dr. Joseph Ciacci loves football, but he fears it. He can’t get enough of the game he prevents his son from playing.

He is in the business of repairing brains. He has seen too much to maintain neutrality.

“The more you know about the issue, the more you think about the issue, the less inclined you are to take a chance,” the UCSD neurosurgeon said. “Because you can’t claim ignorance.”

It’s one thing, Ciacci says, to enter a mine field inadvertently, but quite another to do so when you recognize the risks. Ciacci has had an intimate understanding of those risks since 1977, when his own football career ended with a severe spine injury sustained while covering a high school kickoff.

Amid an avalanche of disturbing new data and harrowing case histories, Ciacci is trying to steer his older son toward water polo.

If concerns about the long-term damage football inflicts attained critical mass with Junior Seau’s suicide, medical professionals have long been attuned and apprehensive. A 2009 study published in the Journal of Athletic Training estimated that high school football annually produces as many as 67,000 reported concussions, and at least as many unreported cases.

With more than a thousand former players pursuing head trauma lawsuits against the NFL, with researchers studying links between football and depression, dementia, memory loss and mood swings, with economists anticipating liability and insurance issues that could threaten the game’s basic viability, the parents of young players are advised to do their homework.

If your son wants to play in a mine field, you should advise him to tread carefully.

“I try to inform them and try to help them to make the best decision that they can,” Ciacci said. “I’m not the type of person who tells people, ‘Don’t do it,’ or ‘Definitely do it.’ I do try to educate them. ...

“I’m finding more and more parents are resistant to having their kids play football and open to understanding the risks involved. ... (I’m) not just some crusader who says, ‘This is the devil’s work.’ Not at all. I’m saying it’s dangerous and people should think about it. It makes you sad a little bit, but you can’t bury your head in the sand.”

When interviewed in March, 2011, Ciacci and his ex-wife, Brenda Holtzclaw, were still weighing the risks as their 260-pound son, Joe, was contemplating a football career at Torrey Pines High School. The family discussion continued into the summer before it was resolved, at least temporarily.

“For now, he’s not playing,” Ciacci said. “We’ve held him out and I’m still not sure that that’s the right decision (but) I’ve been encouraged by the trend of people to do that. Professional athletes have gone on the record as saying they wouldn’t have their kids play. ...

“I think (the younger Joe Ciacci) is disappointed, but I think he’s understanding of it and he realizes it’s based on the intent to protect him from harm that isn’t fully recognized right now.”

It may be years before an adequate data base can be developed from which to draw reliable findings on football’s effect on the brain. Current technology does not allow for diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy except on a post-mortem basis. Though numerous NFL players have pledged their brains to medical research — including former Chargers’ linebacker Billy Ray Smith — Ciacci says “you need a pretty big number of them,” for concrete conclusions.

Such a study could take years, however, perhaps even decades. For parents who need answers in the absence of hard numbers, former Super Bowl Most Valuable Player Kurt Warner has confused the question with a May 3 flip-flop from first discouraging his sons to playing football to then, “I’d love for them to play football.”

Tom Brady Sr., father of the New England quarterback, subsequently told Yahoo he would now be “very hesitant” to let his son play.

“There are distinct personality changes that go along with head trauma,” the elder Brady said. “In the old days, it was conjecture. I don’t think it’s conjecture anymore. And it’s Russian roulette. Different people respond differently. Maybe one person avoids it, but not everyone.”

Some theorists have forecast that football will eventually be deemed so dangerous that its participants will progressively reflect much the same desperate demographic as boxing. Some economists wonder if the game can survive in its current form; if the physics are too frightful and the liability too great for insurance companies to justify.

“There is a risk that the liability will become so great that people will pull out,” Ciacci said. “Once it’s not profitable, once you can’t get people to manufacture the equipment, it could go away or change completely.

“I think it could happen, especially once you have enough people seeing the liability financially, and if you have enough people coming out with validated data that these consequences are devastating in the long term. If you have to pay for this for the rest of your life, it becomes a much bigger risk.”